In general, business entities, such as large corporate enterprises and the like, constantly strive to reduce costs. One of numerous cost reduction initiatives is related to reducing technological infrastructure costs, such as costs related to processing data, data storage, personal computing, servers, telecommunications and the like.
Costs associated with the technological infrastructure have two key components; (1) the internal rate charged, which may be defined as the total spent divided by the total capacity and, (2) the volume of infrastructure consumed, otherwise referred to as consumption. In this regard, the cost of the technological infrastructure is defined as the product of the rate times consumption (i.e., cost=rate×consumption). These two cost factors tend to be mutually exclusive in terms of control. For example, a line or business or other entity within a business may only have control over their volume of infrastructure consumption but they do not have control over the rate at which they are charged for the consumption. Conversely, other factors drive rate increases or decreases, which have no correlation on the volume of consumption required.
All too often, business entities make mandates to reduce technology expenses by a prescribed percentage or dollar amount. However, in many instances, while striving to achieve their goals for reducing technology expenses business entities fail to assess all of the key components that drive cost, i.e., rate and consumption, because the necessary granularity in the data, especially in terms of consumption, is not readily and consistently available. Without such readily available and consistent assessment of both rate and consumption, the business entity is unable to gauge whether cost increases or decreases are driven by rate or consumption fluctuations.
In addition, by prescribing percentage or dollar goals for reducing technological infrastructure costs, business entities tend to manage consumption in a traditional dollar/percent goal manner, as if it was equivalent to cost or the only factor in overall cost. In doing so, business entities fail to comprehend that consumption is not the sole driving indicator of infrastructure cost and, moreover, failure to ascertain and comprehend other factors that influence variances in consumption.
Therefore, a need exists to develop a system for measuring and managing technological infrastructure consumption. The desired systems should provide for automatically generating a consistent and readily available indicator of a business entity's volume of consumption. In addition, the system should provide for identifying key consumption elements, which are within the control of application teams, as components of the indicator, thereby insuring that the key consumption elements are being tracked and managed on an ongoing basis. Moreover, the desired systems should provide for an indicator with drill-down capabilities for the purpose of readily accessing data associated with specific key consumption elements of interest. Additionally, the desired system should provide for an indicator that may apply enterprise-wide, as well as indicator's that may be applied to portions of the business-entity, such as lines of business or the like. As a result, the desired system should provide for ease of tracking technological infrastructure consumption across the enterprise and at sub-levels of the enterprise and provide delineation between the volume of technological infrastructure consumed and the internal rate at which the use of the infrastructure is charged.